The Speed of Air Force One
Was it the weekend before last that there were marches and tragedy in Charlottesville? Was it just a few days later that we realized that the President of the United States was implicitly endorsing white supremacists? Was Bannon fired just last Friday? Was it only two days ago that the President announced a “new” strategy in Afghanistan – and then the next day back to the same old stuff at a rally in Phoenix? And Trump himself has gone from New Jersey to Washington to New York, to New Jersey to Washington, to Virginia, to Washington, to Phoenix and back. Whew!!!!!!
It is no wonder that Americans are tired: tired of the constant tirades, tired of chaos, tired of living in hysteria. Thank God for the total eclipse, we got a breather from our “real” world to marvel at THE REAL world. The Chaos theory of Trump is pretty effective though, as we focused on his tirades and questionable loyalties, we missed the slow drumbeat of Russia building momentum to threaten the Presidency.
Glenn Simpson, the President of Fusion GPS, spent ten hours talking to Senate investigators yesterday. He also left 40,000 pages of documentation. Fusion GPS is the organization that contracted with Christopher Steele to produce the “Steele Dossier” which detailed contacts, collusion and cooperation between Trump and Russian intelligence agencies. While the full text of Simpson’s testimony is still held private (Simpson himself has asked that it be made public) the one point that came out: Simpson and GPS Fusion stand by the accuracy of the dossier.
Billy Piper, a Republican lobbyist and former Chief of Staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell raised the “I” word in remarks about Trump: “The quickest way for him to get impeached is for Trump to knock off Jeff Flake and Dean Heller and be faced with a Democrat-led Senate…”[1] The relationship between Trump and McConnell has gone from shaky to bad, as Trump targets GOP senators (Flake, Heller) for primary challenges by candidates more “Trump-like.”
In addition, Trump has consistently attacked McConnell for the failure of the health-care legislation in the Senate, and now, according to the New York Times, berated McConnell for failing to protect him (Trump) from Russia investigations. Some GOP Senators have been willing to criticized Trump publicly, notably Bob Corker from Tennessee, who raised questions about Trump’s competence to be President. Others are reported to being very critical, privately.
In the meantime his Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, is under investigation by the department’s Inspector General for the “strong arming” Alaska’s Senator Murkowski to pass the health-care legislation. His Treasury Secretary’s wife is attacking folks who complain about her use of public monies for travel, and his Secret Service is running out of overtime money from covering the travels of Trump and his family.
It’s August. We will get back to the meat of the Russia investigation soon, when Congress returns from the August recess. We know that the Mueller investigation is proceeding, with requests for information from the White House itself. We also know that there will be confrontations in Congress about taxes, and more immediately, about the budget and the debt ceiling. The next crisis may be a government shutdown at the end of September.
As events seem to move at the speed of Air Force One, behind the scenes there is the building momentum of the Russian investigation. As Trump burn more bridges, those that could protect him seem less and less inclined to do so. For some of us, the results of the investigation can’t come out soon enough. Expect that there will be more distractions, but know this: we will eventually know what really happened between Trump and Russia.
PS – on a wholly different subject – what is the likelihood that the most professional Navy in the world would have four ship collisions in the same geographic area in the past several months? Several sailors have been killed in these incidents. The Navy is treating this as human errors and has relieved the three-star admiral in command as well as others. But as all of these events are in proximity to China, and China has a huge interest in dis-crediting the US Navy in the region, is someone checking that our incredibly complex navigation computers haven’t been hacked?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/us/politics/mitch-mcconnell-trump.html
